“Old Scald Village,” Holly reads. “Oh, I get it. You’re some kind of reenactor, or whatever they’re called.”
“Mmmnn, yes,” the Minotaur says. Whatever they’re called.
“Encampment Weekend,” she says with exaggeration. “Annual Spring Civil War Festival.”
It’s a copy of the first draft of the flier. Widow Fisk, Gwen, was working out some kinks.
“You work here?” Holly asks. “Where is this place?”
“Just down,” the Minotaur says, and points with his thumb.
Holly sniffles and keeps reading. “Battles twice daily. Full cavalry. Union and Confederate camp walk-throughs. You really do this stuff?”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says. He leans his musket in the corner.
“Hey!” Holly says, poking hard at the Minotaur’s brass buttons. “This is perfect!”
Again the old bull wishes he could say yes. Yes, this is perfect.
“You know who would love this?” she asks.
Yes. No.
“Tooky,” she says. “Tookus would really like all this.”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says again, meaning so much.
The boy, Tookus, her damaged brother, would love Old Scald Village. So would the redhead. The Minotaur imagines the scene. Him leading the way. The bells from the church spire will announce their arrival. They’ll visit the Tin Punch Cottage and the candle maker. Holly will pose in the pillory. The Minotaur will take them to the Old Jail, might even let Tookus close the cell door on him. The Minotaur sees it all in his wandering mind. Sees more than he intends. The Broom Shack and the fat ass of the broom maker spoiling everything. Sees the blacksmith’s forge and Smitty and the branding iron.
“Tssss,” is all the Minotaur can manage.
“Will you take us?” Holly asks. “Can we watch? Can we see you fight?”
The redhead standing in Room #3 of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge sees something in the flier that the Minotaur can’t. It’s as if the crumpled page holds a secret. Or a solution. Or maybe just reprieve. The Minotaur sees none of this. Sees only the woman in her moment of need. Sees the need, and the way her heartbeat pulses through the Mighty Mouse T-shirt, right there on the grinning rodent’s curled bicep, right there by the tiny peak of her nipple.
“Yes,” the Minotaur says. Of course he’ll take Tookus and Holly to Old Scald Village to watch him fight and die. He can’t look Holly in the eye. Can’t look any longer at the rise and fall of her breasts. Can look only to the floor, and in passing he sees the tiny drop of blood trickling down her white thigh.
“Oh,” the Minotaur says. “Are you, umm, all right?”
His fingertip is close. He could easily catch the bright red droplet on his nail. In the distance Scald Mountain’s camisole of fog is lifting.
“Hmmm,” Holly says. She turns away, pulls the hem of her shorts high. “Just a scratch,” she says. “I’ll get a Band-Aid later.”
She looks at the smear of blood on her finger. She’s about to do something with it when they both hear the office door slam open. Holly is closer; she looks first. The Minotaur leans out from behind her.
“This is an outrage!”
It’s the fat man with donkey ears.
“I strongly condemn your actions!” he says, his fat finger stabbing the sky.
“And you haven’t seen the last of me!” he says, that same fat finger pointed inside the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge office.
Holly’s finger, the bloody one, points toward the earth. The Minotaur’s horns reach skyward. Nobody is ready for Tookus when he runs from his motel room clutching the carboy full of change. Runs full steam into the angry fat man coming down the sidewalk.
The man and his rage are immovable. “Move, boy!”
Tookus moves. Tookus bounces, unhurt but terrified. The glass jug shatters on the cement, five gallons of tip money scattering hither and yon.
“Goddamn it, Tookus!” Holly says.
It’s not his fault. He cowers anyway.
“Why? Why do you always . . . ? Why does it always . . . ?”
Glass crunches under the fat man’s shoes. He chucks a suitcase into the backseat of his sedan and peels out of the parking lot, back in the direction he came from in the night.
Tookus sits against the wall, shaking his hands, rocking back and forth, crying. “Fatty. Fatty fat fat. Dick titty fat fucker,” he says.
“I can’t do this anymore, Took,” Holly says, arms raised, palms up. “I can’t.”
When Holly starts to cry, too, her brother gets to his knees and begins raking the money into a pile. Scooping the quarters and dimes. The nickels and pennies. And the shards of glass.
“No, no, Tooky! Stop!”
Holly rushes to her brother, but Tookus is too strong. He will not stop. Won’t stop dragging his cupped hands over the rough cement, through the glass and coins. The Minotaur goes to help, but Ramneek Gupta gets there first.
“So jaa,” she sings, kneeling in front of the boy. “So jaa raajkumaari so jaa.”
Tookus looks up.
“So jaa,” she sings. Ramneek takes the boy’s wrists, stills him. “Main balihaari so jaa, so jaa raajkumaari so jaa.”
Tookus allows himself to be lifted, standing when Ramneek stands.
“So jaa, so jaa raajkumaari so jaa.”
Ramneek does not look at Tookus’s palms. Holly can’t look anywhere else. There is so much blood. The boy stands perfectly still, his eyes squeezed shut.
“Things often appear much worse than they actually are,” Ramneek says. “I will take care of this.” She leads Holly’s brother to the motel office, into its open door, singing all the way. “So jaa main balihaari. So jaa. So jaa raajkumaari so jaa.”
Holly sighs deeply, squats against the wall, and starts plucking quarters. One, two, three, four, five, six. Then she stands and hurls them out onto Business 220. They ping and clink softly on the pavement.
“Why?” she says. “It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m not the god-damn mother. I’m not supposed to be his fucking . . .”
The Minotaur stoops with a Judy-Lou Motor Lodge ice bucket and gathers change. He doesn’t speak.
“We have to go,” Holly says. She’s talking to herself, mostly. “I’ve made the arrangements. I’ve . . . we have to go soon.”
Holly looks around. The Minotaur thinks he knows what she means. It doesn’t take long to fill the plastic bucket. The Minotaur gets another, and together, and quietly, they resume the task.
“It’s not my fault,” Holly says.
“Mmmnn.”
“I tried,” she says. “I did the best I could. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Mmmnn.”
The morning opens (always) incrementally. It’s not long before Danny Tanneyhill drives up, his truck not done rumbling and rattling to a stop by the Pygmalia-Blades trailer when he hurries over to the motel.
“Hey,” he says, eyeballing Holly’s bare legs, “you’ll never believe what happened.”
Holly, from her squat, rolls her eyes and blows at a strand of hair. “Try me,” she says.
The woodcarver doesn’t ask why Holly and the Minotaur are hunkered there, amid the broken glass, pitching coins into ice buckets, but he joins them anyway.
“That fucking church,” he says. “The church from last night. The one on the trailer.”
“I know what church you’re talking about,” Holly says.
“Mmmnn.”
“It fell off,” Danny says, grinning wide.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the church fell off of the trailer! It’s blocking the entrance to that Old Scald Village place down the road, where big boy here works. The dumbass driver tried to turn in too fast or something.”
“Mmmnn, back way?” the Minotaur says. The Old Scald service road is where big deliveries come and go.
“I don’t know anything about your back way,” Danny says. “But that truck is on its side, half in the ditch, and what’s left o
f the church is jammed up against an old covered bridge.”
The Minotaur looks down Business 220. Drawn. Compelled. Worried.
“There are ambulances and everything,” he says. “Probably squashed some of those shit-heels in their playclothes.”
“Fuck,” Holly says, not quite amused.
“Exactly!” Danny Tanneyhill says. “Let’s go see it!”
“Mmmnn, no,” the Minotaur says. Though he wants more than anything to go. “No.”
It’s enough. The spell is broken.
“I don’t have time for that kind of bullshit,” Holly says. “I have to get the van fixed. Somehow.”
Everybody looks across Business 220 at the Odyssey, still canting on its jack.
“Psshh,” Danny says. “We’ve got you covered, darlin’. Me and cowboy here will have you fixed up in no time.”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
The smells of the Guptas’ breakfast (the buttery fried bread, garlic, maybe—potatoes, too) drift down the sidewalk. The Minotaur wishes he could go in and sit at their table. Wishes he could take Holly along.
“First of all,” Holly says, “I’m not your darlin’. Second of all, what do you mean? I don’t have time or money to waste.”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad,” the woodcarver says. “I just mean that between me and the master mechanic here, we can get you up and running lickety-split.”
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says again. It’s probably true, but he wants a say in the conversation. Wants not to be roped into a responsibility by the woodcarver’s desire.
Holly looks about to cry again. “I can’t afford . . .”
Business 220 stretches silently out of sight. There is crisis at one end. The Minotaur tilts his horns accordingly. What if Widow Fisk is hurt? Or Biddle, even?
“Don’t worry,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “Everything will be okay.”
That’s probably true as well, but the Minotaur interjects anyway.
“Unngh.”
“We’ll make a plan,” Danny says. “Me and cyborg, we’ll have you fixed up in no time.”
“Unngh.”
“Better still,” the woodcarver says, toying with the saw blade around his neck and working hard (and failing) not to look at Holly’s chest, “Mister Wrench here can surely handle the job, and I’ll take you and Spooky down to see all the stupids at the Old Scald—”
“No,” the Minotaur says. “No.”
“No,” Holly says.
“Whatever,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “We’ll stay together, then.”
“I need to check on Took first,” Holly says. She hands a half-full ice bucket to Danny. “Take over.”
He grunts but acquiesces.
The Minotaur follows her into the Judy-Lou office, and deeper still to the Guptas’ apartment. Tookus sits on a couch watching cartoons with Devmani. His hands are fat and white, ghost puppets, blimps. No. Bandages. Holly gasps.
Ramneek comes quickly to her side. “Shhh,” the woman says, taking Holly by the arm. “The boy is fine. His cuts are few and shallow.”
Holly gestures, one hand loosely circling the other.
“The boy simply liked the tape and bandaging. So I kept going.”
• • •
The Minotaur is just supposed to go get his tools. Just. Just gather his wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers and go back across Business 220 to meet with the redhead and the woodcarver to talk about the Odyssey. The Minotaur is not supposed to scramble out the back window of Room #3, clamber down the laurel-choked slopes all the way to the bank of Mill Run. Is not, that misguided old bull, supposed to follow the stream west. Is not, but does.
Mill Run, Stink Creek, runs red and foamy.
The Minotaur makes haste.
Finds himself quickly enough at the chaotic mouth of Old Scald Village. Hides there behind a thick clump of cattails, hoping their fat brown bloom spikes will camouflage him. The Minotaur sees but does not want to be seen.
He has several options. Decisions to make. If he shows himself, if he helps in this moment of need, maybe he’ll be forgiven. Pardoned. No. The Minotaur is a realist. He knows human nature. The old covered bridge, both ingress and egress, is blocked, battered by the wrecked church. The whole scene is clotted with familiar faces. Smitty pretending some authority. Biddle smirking, doing something with his cell phone. Tow trucks. Men with wenches and cables and jacks and testosterone in abundance. An ambulance is present, its rear door gaping wide. The Minotaur looks long and hard, finds no one stretchered. Doc sits dejected on a rotting railroad tie, holding a rubber forearm and hand, his ersatz knowledge useless. And Widow Fisk? The Minotaur can’t find her there.
Throwing caution to the wind, he circumnavigates the small-scale calamity, rushes, top heavy in his need, through the backyards of Old Scald Village, making his way to the Welcome Center, where he thinks he sees the Open sign in the window, making his way to Widow Fisk, to Gwen, to make sure she’s okay, to maybe even say he’s sorry. He’ll just march right through the Gift Shoppe and into her office, and if anybody tries to stop him the Minotaur will . . . will . . .
“Hey!”
The Minotaur looks up. Up from his studied tread. Up and into the eyes of Destiny. The broom maker. She’s in her open window. He’s in the backyard of the Broom Shack.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says.
She wields a weapon, a stiff cane besom broom.
The Minotaur runs. It is not a pretty sight. He makes a lopsided sort of gallop across the graveled main street of Old Scald Village, runs past the Cooper’s Shack, through the stockade and its adjacent pasture, runs, wheezing by now, around the other side of the covered bridge, heads farther down and back over Business 220, sidles along the shoulder of the road, more in the ditch than out, paying so much attention to being unseen by anyone in attendance at the Old Scald Village crisis that he trips over something and falls flat on his bull face.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“Muutate,” comes the answer. Gravelly and harsh. More retch than language.
It’s the giant plaster soldier speaking. The giant plaster soldier, knocked from its base (by the Dingus truck, no doubt), lies in pieces on its plaster belly. Much like the Minotaur.
“Ch-ch-changeling!” the solider squawks.
The Minotaur sits up and kicks the hideous beast. A crow wriggles from the gaping neck hole, hops onto the soldier’s back, struts up and down, looks at the grounded Minotaur, fluffs its black self up to gargantuan size, vomits a dissonant curse, then flies away.
• • •
By the time the Minotaur returns, everybody at the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge is mad at him.
“Where the hell did you go?” Danny Tanneyhill asks.
“We knocked on your door, Mister M,” Rambabu says.
Holly doesn’t speak, but her look says enough.
“Unngh, sorry,” the Minotaur says, squatting by the shallow maw of the Odyssey’s empty wheel well.
The Minotaur shows Holly the damage. So much damage. So much need. He tells her what is needed to get the vehicle back on the road.
Holly kneels there with him. She binds her red hair tightly in a ponytail. She wears snug jeans, not the loose boxers. And the Mighty Mouse shirt still. It rides a little high, and the swath of soft belly flesh is so pale it threatens to gobble up all of the day’s light. She’s doing calculations in her head, tapping out sums, or maybe counting days. Holly cries. Says she doesn’t have the money. Says she doesn’t have the time.
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says. He has some bills folded in the bottom of his haversack.
“Hey,” Danny Tanneyhill says, “my buddy owns a salvage yard!”
Holly doesn’t know what that means. Danny Tanneyhill explains.
“You’re not fucking with me, are you?” Holly asks. “You better not be fucking with me.”
The woodcarver strikes a saintly pose, palms up, eyes full of forced compassion.
“I don’t have time . . . We can’t . . . ,” Holly says.
“Have a little faith, darlin’,” he says.
“I told you,” Holly says, “I’m not your darlin’. Can we go? Can we go right now?”
“We’ll take my truck,” Danny says.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says.
“I’m gonna get Tooky,” Holly says.
The man and the Minotaur watch her cross Business 220. Watch her lug the man in the moon into her room and close the door.
“Can you handle this?” Danny asks. He touches the saw-blade necklace that hangs beneath his dirty T-shirt and toes at the brake drum on the ground. He probably means the repair job.
“Unngh,” the Minotaur says, touching a horn tip (the one that touched Holly’s thigh) and snapping a socket on a ratchet. He means several things.
The woodcarver and the half-bull mill around, waiting for the girl to return.
“You never said where you disappeared to,” Danny Tanneyhill says. “I thought maybe you . . .”
Holly emerges from the Judy-Lou office. It’s enough to shut the woodcarver up.
“Took’s watching Gilligan’s Island with the little girl,” she says. “He wants to stay. I hope he’ll be all right.”
“Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, trying to sound comforting. He gathers the necessary tools, looks at the Odyssey’s damaged parts.
Danny Tanneyhill sings to himself, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.”
Holly keeps looking back at the motel. “He’ll be fine, right? She’ll keep him . . . I just need a break, just a little time.”
“Mmmnn, yes,” the Minotaur says. “Safe.”
Danny Tanneyhill sings even louder as he loads a stubby carving of a football helmet painted Pittsburgh Steelers black and gold: “The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed.”
“What’s that for?” Holly asks, grabbing the faceguard.
“Bargaining power,” the carver says. “And you never even thanked me for the man in the moon.”
“It almost killed me,” she says. “Thanks for that.”
Danny Tanneyhill climbs into the driver’s seat and cranks the engine. Revs it. The passenger door stands wide open. Holly looks at the Minotaur, shrugs, and climbs in. She scoots close to Danny and pats the seat.
The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Page 13
